The UX Shop: 8 Tips to run professional interviews

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One Side Project Challenge

5 min readApr 2, 2016

Every month at The UX Shop, we meet and interview an Influencer: inspiring designers who give our readers their vision of User Experience, describe her working environment and share with us her favorite tools. For us, it’s a very special moment that we love to perform and organize. Here is a checklist we wrote and use for each one of our interview. We though it might be useful to share it with you guys. Let us know if it’s the case :)

1. Don’t be scared to find the right person

First, we select our influencers because we love what they do and think interviewing them will bring a valuable experience to our readers. It appears that some of them have a certain notoriety and at the beginning we were not necessary comfortable contacting them out of the blue. You know, this feeling when you stumble upon a famous actress in the street and you never really dare to say hello. We were scared to ask.

Well don’t be afraid. Passionate people are always happy to talk about their passion. The thing is that even if you’re a very nice person, they have a limited amount of time to spend with you. The challenge is to optimize the way you ask and go straight to the point. Here is what we do:

Describe our concept in no more than 25 words
Explain in one sentence why we chose them
Describe how we usually run our interviews and be clear on its duration
Propose a convenient place to do it. The less you make them move, the higher the chance is to get a positive answer.
Propose a convenient moment to do it

The last point is important. For example if you want to interview a speaker at a conference, make sure you give her enough time to answer the questions of the audience and to breath 5 minutes before your interview starts. Make it clear that you think about these things when you ask.

It’s has never been easier to contact a person today than ever before. If you don’t have the e-mail or the possibility to talk directly to the person, check her activities on social networks. If she posts several tweets a day, it means she is more likely to check her twitter account and answer to a private message.

2. Write the interview outline

Awesome, you made it! Time to get to work then and write your interview outline. Yeah, it’s not the best idea to show up empty handed at an interview. Even if you feel pretty confident and are a good communicator yourself, you might be stressed that day and things might get messy then.

Our interview outline is composed of a stable set of questions we ask to all our influencers. It always start by the person introducing herself and a definition of the subject we want to talk about (in our case User Experience Design). Then, according to the fact checking you did on the person, it’s your job to write specific and appropriate questions. Remember, you are the one on the driver’s sit here. Before starting the interview, you have to know what you want to hear. If it’s not the case, you’re not ready.

3. Arrive early

When D-day comes, be sure to arrive before the scheduled time. You might have some problems to find the place, the room (Ain’t no joke, it happened to us for real and we missed the appointment, cheers Jeff if you read this :)).

4. Set your scene

Once you found the place, you have to set your environnement, especially if you are filming the interview or taking pictures. Be sure your scene is clear and hide the dirty dishes in the sink in the background. Your might not see it but your camera will and so will all your readers!

5. Bring a positive reward

We noticed arriving with a box of fresh macarons is the best way to ensure our interviewees are relaxed and confident. You can replace the macarons by anything sweet.

6. Record everything

Of course, you will always record the audio of the interview. Even if you take notes, it won’t be enough to remember the exact words of your interviewee. You can easily use your iPhone to do so. For Android users, I recommend Audio Recorder.

7. Run the interview

Start the interview with the easy questions, then get to the hot stuff. You might not follow your interview outline and that’s ok. Try to install a conversation and don’t be afraid to react spontaneously. Even if it’s a conversation, let the person talk and express herself. I know it’s tempting to fill up the blanks but don’t rush the person and try to focus on what she says.

8. Write the result

If like us the result of your interview is an article, here comes the most time-consuming phase: transforming our audio recording into a readable article. For us, the best tool to do so is Soundcloud. We upload all our recordings there, making sure the track will stay private. Then, we listen a first time the entire interview to have a global overview of our material. At the same time, we comment the audio sequence directly on Soundcloud to identify the parts we want to keep and write down. Each comment creates a convenient marker on the track. Once you’ve reached this point, the job is almost done.

Concerning The UX Shop last month:
• We published our third interview => Pauline Thomas
• We met a new Influencer from San-Francisco

Goals for this month:
• We are still working on our newsletter and hope release the first edition
• We are working on the prototype of the first real life product made by The UX Shop, can’t say more, hope to write about it very soon.

Wanna have a look at our project? Please visit http://theuxshop.com
Handpicked resources for/by digital designers
Interviews of people who care about users

If you want to give us a virtual hug, your can 💚 recommend this article and follow our stories on the One Side Project Challenge publication.We will be giving project updates on the 2nd of every month.